Eva Ibbotson

There were seventeen swans, an uneven number and a pity, but the mother of a girl Dubrov had engaged from the Lumley School of Dance in Regent Street had gone to Dr. Mudie’s Library and looked up the Amazon in Chamber’s Encyclopaedia—and that had been that.

Now, in the dirty, draughty and near-derelict theater in Bloomsbury he had hired for the last week prior to the Company’s departure, Dubrov was watching his maitre de ballet rehearsing the corps in Act Two of Swan Lake. The moonlit act… the white act… the act in which the ravishing Swan Queen, Odette, is discovered by Prince Siegfried among her protecting and encircling swans…

The Swan Queen, however, was at the dentist and the premier danseur, Maximov, who played the Prince, was not on call until four o’clock. It was the swans that were at issue and here all was far from well. For from the swans in Swan Lake the choreographer demands not individuality or self-expression but a relentless and perfect unison. Above all, these doomed and feathered creatures are supposed to move as one.

“Again!” said Grisha wearily, turning his white Picasso clown’s face up to the heavens. “From the second entry. Remember heads down on the échappés and when you take hands it is to the front that you must face.” He hummed, demonstrated, became—this comical wizened little man—for an instant a graceful swan. “Can you give me five bars before section 12?” He nodded to Irina Petrova and the ancient accompanist stubbed out her cigarette in the discarded pointe shoe she had been using as an ashtray and lowered her mottled hands onto the piano keys.

And there’s still Act Three of Rile, thought Dubrov, watching out front—and Giselle and we’ve scarcely touched The Nutcracker, with five days to go. I must be mad, taking out four full-length ballets. But he hated the chopping and dismemberment that was so fashionable—plucking out an act here, a divertissement there… And his principals were good: not just Simonova and Maximov, but Lobotsky, his character dancer, and the young Polish girl whom Simonova feared but to whom she had ceded the Sugar Plum Fairy…

“Cross over!” yelled Grisha. “Both lines! And the legs are croisé behind you—all the legs!” His voice rose to a shriek. “You there at the end! What is your name—Kirstin… Where are you going?”

Where the slender sad-raced Swede was going, just as in earlier rehearsals, was upstage right, performing rather beautiful and mournful ports de bras as was invariably done at this point in the version of the ballet she had learned in Copenhagen. The petite and exquisite French girl, Marie-Claude, on the other hand, still carried a torch for the Paris Opera version (which cut five minutes out of the Act Two running time to give the citizens time to refresh themselves) and had bourréed off altogether during a previous run-through to be discovered alone and puzzled in a corridor. .

Even with the Russian girls who made up the bulk of the corps—marvelously drilled and strong-backed creatures who rightly knew that only in their country was the art of ballet seriously understood—all was not well. For the hallowed steps which Petipa and Ivanov had devised for Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece in St. Petersburg had been wickedly tampered with by a rogue ballet master in Moscow and little Olga Narukov, finding herself en arabesque opposite a swan giving her all to her rands de jambe, had stamped her foot and declared her intention of returning to Ashkhabad.

The disconsolate Kirstin was comforted by the girl next to her and the rehearsal was resumed. An hour later—exhausted, hungry and dripping with perspiration—they will still practicing the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form, three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.

It was at this point that a stage-hand came up to Dubrov and said, “There’s a young lady asking to see you. Said you said she could come.”

“Oh?” Dubrov was puzzled. “Well, bring her along.”

The man vanished and reappeared with a young girl in a blue coat and tarn o’shanter, carrying a small suitcase. A schoolgirl, it seemed to him, with worried eyes.

“I’m Harriet Morton,” she said in her low, incorrigibly educated voice, “from Cambridge. You saw me at Madame Lavarre’s. You said…” Her voice tailed away. She had made a mistake; of course he had not wanted her.

“Yes.” Dubrov had recognized her now and smilingly put a hand on her arm. “Grisha!” he called. “Come here!”

The swans came to rest, the music stopped and Grisha, frowning at the interruption, came over to Dubrov.

“This is Harriet Morton,” said the impresario. “Your eighteenth swan.”

The ballet master stared at her. What was he supposed to do now, at the eleventh hour, with this English child?